Blowing & Drifting

On my way back from a bike ride the other day, I saw something surprising and impressive: hundreds of pieces of farm equipment lined up in a field on the farm of Palmer Fossum, a well-known Northfield farmer who died in 2007. The whole lot of them will be auctioned off next month, and could pull in as much as a half-million dollars, with some of the tractors being plain cool

Fossum Tractor

and others being pretty rare:

A 1949 Ford 8N equipped with a flathead V-8, for example, originally sold for about $1,500… The tractor, one of three known originals in the world, could fetch upwards of $15,000.

The auctioneer’s website has close-up shots of many of the machines, but it’s amazing to see the whole field full of tractors, implements, combines, trucks, parts, and god knows what else… (Click here and here for the fuller-size images.)